“The sporty look of a Ferrari, the economy of a Volkswagen, and the appeal of a Thunderbird.” That’s what Ford vice president Lee Iacocca had in mind for his “youth car.” His hand-picked team refined those seemingly contradictory guidelines into more specific goals in early 1961. The new car needed...

The Citroën DS 19 was one of the most innovative production vehicles of the 20th century. It’s “glass escargot” design evoked French philosopher Roland Barthes to remark in 1957 that the DS 19 had “obviously fallen from the sky.” The DS 19’s origins can be traced to back to the...

In 1990, my wife JoAnne and I traveled to England for a wedding. Afterward, we toured the UK for another four weeks in a rented Mini Mayfair. The car was an absolute joy to drive—peppy, tight, responsive, roomy and thoroughly comfortable.  Tooling around England, the thought struck me how much...

My mother is from Breslau, Germany.  She had a privileged youth growing up in the 1920s and ‘30s: she had a governess, house keepers and long summer vacations on the Baltic sea.  And her father, George Skiebe, my Opa, had a car collection.  He had a Mercedes 540 and a...

For most of automotive history, the main impediments to the electric car have been battery technology (limited range) and cheap oil.  The energy crises of the 1970s awakened interest in alternative propulsion, but range and utility remained elusive goals. The family car was expected to go 300 miles or more...

Of all the automobiles that changed the world, the Chrysler line of minivans is likely to win the award of “least exciting” by most automotive enthusiasts.  But that was never the point; the minivan was not intended to be flashy, instead it was a car with a purpose that fulfilled...

The Model T ranks with the airplane, radio, television, and the digital computer as one of the key inventions that helped shape the twentieth century.  Historian David Hounshell called the Ford Model T “the only revolutionary automobile of the twentieth century,” because what it did could be done only once....

In a major way the advent of the autonomous vehicles today compares closely with the arrival of the controversial horseless carriage over a century ago.  Initially neither innovation was broadly embraced by the general public. The debate at the turn of the 20th century was why buy one of those new-fangled...

The Jeep was the result of a request by the Army  in 1940 for a general purpose vehicle that was small, lightweight, had four-wheel drive for cross-country travel, and capable of carrying a light machine gun. Initially, only two companies provided vehicles to meet this requirement: American Bantam (the Bantam...

R. E. Olds was born and raised in Ohio and eventually settled in Lansing, Michigan where he founded the Olds Motor Company on August 21, 1897. The company was bought by a copper and lumber magnate named Samuel L. Smith in 1899 and renamed the Olds Motor Works. The new...